Stunning geekery

cvirtue sent me a link to a
New Yorker article about digitizing the Unicorn Tapestries. The tech involved is pretty interesting, and so is the description of the tapestries themselves; but what really got me was the description of the Chudnovsky brothers.

I'd heard of them before, in passing, but I never knew much in the way of details.
Now...well, it's humbling. There's a bit in Snow Crash about how Hiro feels when he finds out about Raven's nuke. Something like "Hiro, like pretty much every male, has thought, occasionally, that, if he really had to, he could become the world's most stupendous badass. If he dedicated his life to it, if his parents were killed and he needed to get revenge, if he spent a year or three training in a monastery, Bruce Lee-style, that sort of thing. Now, though, he's relieved of such notions: the top spot is firmly occupied by Raven." When I read that, I never really connected with it before, since I've never thought that way. Now, though, I have an analogy. The Chudnovsky Mathematician is the world's most stupendous badass geek.